TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 433

+25 Pomte

CHAPTER 358: TALK TO HER

EMBER’S POV

“DEAL,” Queenie announces, at a volume clearly designed to break up whatever is happening between us, clapping her hands together with enormous cheer. “Okay! Wonderful! It’s decided! Ember’s a feral heiress shopping for rough trade; Knox is her devastatingly jealous bodyguard who’s going to assault the staff; Devika’s the madam of a crime lord’s brothel floor, and we are all

going to a rogue casino, and there’s a doll of Knox somewhere getting pelted with eggs. This is,

without question, the healthiest thing this friend group has ever done together.” She spins her

tablet around and stands. “Now. Nathaniel.”

And the temperature in the room drops about ten degrees because she says his name the way you’d address a stranger, flat and professional, and I watch him go carefully still.

“Nathaniel runs comms,” she continues, not looking at him, all business. “From the car. He’s got

eyes on the building; he’s in our ears; he pulls us out if it goes sideways. He does not come inside because Nathaniel has exactly the kind of face that the Slaughterhouse’s people would clock as

someone’s fixer in about four seconds, and a fixer means a boss, and a boss means questions.”

She sets the tablet down. “So he sits in the car. And keeps us alive from a distance. Which is, I’m

told, the thing he’s good at.”

The barb lands. I see it land.

Nathaniel’s jaw tightens, just slightly, and for a second the old machine flickers – the urge to argue, to optimise, to engineer his way out of the corner – and then, visibly, he swallows it.

“I sit in the car,” he says quietly. “Understood.”

“Good.”

“Queenie-”

“We’re not doing this here.” She stands, gathers her tablet, brisk. “I’ll handle the wardrobe and the

identities. Ember needs to become Merrilyn, which means we have work to do – hair, jewellery, a

whole invented life she can recite in her sleep, and goddess help us, she needs to be able to sell

bored, rich, and hungry for a filthy man in a room that reads lies off skin. Her cover can’t be a lie. It

has to be a character she believes.” She’s already moving toward the door. “We start tomorrow. Ember, get some rest. You’ve got an heiress to build.”

And she’s gone, sweeping out, leaving Nathaniel staring after her with the specific devastation of a

man watching a door close that he doesn’t know how to open.

The room is quiet.

15

1.3

CHAPTER ONE TALK TO HER

+25 Pointe I look at him. He’s sitting very still, hands flat on the table, doing that thing where he holds himself

together through sheer structural will, and I think about the cafeteria, about a man on his knees

asking me how to save his marriage, and something in me softens despite everything he’s done.

“Nathaniel.” I keep my voice gentle. “Can I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“Have you started? Doing anything. To win her back.” I watch his face. “It’s been days. You said you

needed one chance to do right by her. Have you taken it?”

And Nathaniel – brilliant, strategic, engineered–outcomes Nathaniel – looks at me with an

expression of genuine confusion, like I’ve asked him something in a language he doesn’t speak.

“I tried to talk to her,” he says.

“And?”

“She told me she never wants to hear from me again.” He says it flatly, like a data point. “So I’m

respecting that. I’m giving her space. I don’t contact her; I don’t reach out; I don’t push. She set a

boundary, and I’m honouring it.”

I stare at him.

I stare at him for a long, long moment because I cannot believe what I’m hearing, and I have to

physically restrain myself from putting my head down on the table.

“Nathaniel,” I say slowly. “Are you a fucking idiot? She didn’t mean to disappear.”

“She was very clear-”

“She said she never wants to hear from you again because she is hurt, you beautiful, brilliant

disaster of a man.” I lean forward. “That’s not a boundary. That’s a test. That’s a woman who is

drowning in how much she still loves you and is furious about it, daring you to prove she matters

more than your pride. And you responded by – what – filing the paperwork? Respecting the

boundary? Nathaniel. You don’t win a woman back by leaving her alone. You win her back by

showing her, in a hundred small ways, that you see her. That you’re not going anywhere. That the man she had married is still in there under all the-” I gesture at all of him “-engineering.”

He blinks. “But she said-”

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